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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're devoting the first of two episodes to the epic tale of the German battleship Turpitz,

which was finally sunk by RAF bombers onF. Bombers on the 12th of

November 1944, 80 years ago. Patrick covered all of this in his brilliant book, Target Turpitz,

X-Craft, agents and dambusters, the epic quest to destroy Hitler's mightiest warship. Patrick, I don't

if you remember, but I reviewed the book in the Daily

Telegraph. And my first paragraph, I'm just going to read out because I think it sets the scene

quite nicely, and it goes something like this. Where is Terpitz, wrote a jittery Winston Churchill

to his first sea lord in December 1942. It was not a lone inquiry. And the exact whereabouts of

Hitler's mightiest warship were to remain a constant preoccupation for the Prime Minister for much of the war.

So dangerous did he consider the turpets that in January 1942, he had told his naval chief that the, and I quote,

the crippling of this ship would alter the entire face of the naval war and the loss of 100

machines and 500 airmen would be well compensated for. So you can see clearly there that Churchill

all the way through this extraordinary story is very concerned as to what turpits can do to the

British war effort. So to set the scene, Patrick, give us a little bit of a sense of turpid scale when the ship was launched, then why it was considered such a threat by

Churchill and others. Yes, interesting, isn't it? I think this is a kind of indication of Churchill's

Edwardian mindset when the big battleship was, you know, the mightiest beast in the military arsenals of the world.

...